Beyond 'Collateral Consequences': Bringing New Methods to Old Questions

Sara Wakefield, associate professorRutgers School of Criminal Justice

Tuesday, April 310:30 - 11:30 a.m.Cronkite 252Register: goo.gl/wjN9bN

Hosted by the Center for Correctional Solutions

The unprecedented growth of the criminal justice system in the United States has motivated an expansive volume of research on the collateral consequences of punishment. Yet the full reckoning of the formal and informal consequences of mass incarceration and the tough-on-crime era is hindered by a set of thorny challenges that are both methodological and theoretical in nature.

Wakefield will examine these enduring challenges and describe evidence on the reentry process using newly collected data from the Men’s and Women’s Prison Inmate Networks Reentry Studies (R-PINS & WOR-PINS). She describes 1) how heterogeneity in conditions of confinement and reentry experiences impact former inmates and their families and 2) a novel mixed methods approach to studying incarceration and reentry.

Biosketch: Sara Wakefield received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2007.

Her research interests focus on the consequences of mass imprisonment for the family, with an emphasis on childhood well-being and racial inequality, culminating in a series of articles and book, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Oxford University Press, with Chris Wildeman).

More recently, she is working on several original data collection projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice. The Prison Inmate Networks Studies (PINS and WO-PINS) leverage a variety of methods and data sources (surveys, intensive interviews, administrative data, and social network analysis) to more fully understand how social ties influence the conditions of confinement, community reintegration, and social inequality.